I was talking to a founder last week who couldn't figure out why his operations manager kept dropping the ball.

"He's smart, he works hard, he genuinely cares," the founder told me. "I just don't understand what's going wrong."

So I asked one question: "Is he actually an operations person, or is he someone you trusted and moved into that role because he'd been around the longest?"

Silence.

That's usually the answer.

One of the most expensive mistakes I see business owners make is promoting loyalty over fit. Someone earns trust over years, so they get handed a seat that was never really theirs. And then everyone suffers, the owner, the team, and honestly, the person in the role most of all.

The right person in the wrong seat is still the wrong hire for that seat.

Getting this right isn't about being ruthless. It's about being honest. Honest about what the role actually demands, honest about what the person genuinely does well, and honest about whether those two things actually match.

When they do match, something shifts. The person stops struggling and starts thriving. The team stops compensating and starts moving. And you, the owner, stop managing around the problem and start trusting the function.

Most scaling problems I see aren't strategy problems. They're people-in-seats problems.

So here's the question worth sitting with: In your business right now, is there someone in a role they were given rather than a role they were built for?

CREATING A STRATEGIC ROADMAP

Diagram showing a 5-step strategic roadmap process. Step 1: Start your strategic initiatives planning with an in-depth understanding of current state. Step 2: Establish high-level goals that align with strategic objectives (Think "SMART"). Step 3: Establish a future-state business process, systems, + parties recommendations. Step 4: Perform a GAP analysis - current state vs. future state. Step 5: Execute on the project initiatives + follow PM best practices. Think "SMART"

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From "The Owner's Almanac" - 90 days to build a business that runs without you. Available on Amazon.